Monthly Archives: October 2010

“This shipping notification is being sent to you by the U.S. Postal Service…”

I’d like to think the book is making its way across the Atlantic in the dark and slimy hold of an aged tramp steamer, accompanied by wild-eyed Norwegian sailors. But possibly not. I’m hoping to be opening the package in about two weeks.

Those interested in the possible influence of H.G. Wells on H.P. Lovecraft (Victorian pessimism about the ultimate fate of man in the light of advanced science and the unsustainability of religious belief, degeneration of the race, seamless blendings of horror and science fiction, the uncertainty of perception and world-understanding on the part of the scientific/rational narrator, tentacles, etc) might be interested that I’ve just published a Selected Bibliography of Scholarship on H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (PDF link, 220Kb). I undertook it as part of creating a new 18,000 word novelette The Time Machine: a sequel for the Amazon Kindle Store.

Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book on unwritten story ideas, written up as about 25 new stories…

“I put together a pool of writers from across the country, ranging from playwrights to improv actors to magazine editors to internet comedy writers, and I gave them all the same simple proposal: I would use a random number generator to assign them one of the Lovecraft ideas. They would then write, with the only limitation being that they fulfil all aspects of the idea they were given.”

Lovecraft’s full original list is available here or as a PDF here. Just one example…

“Adventures of a disembodied spirit — thro’ dim, half-familiar cities and over strange moors — thro’ space and time — other planets and universes in the end.”